We have been hearing how cloud computing is a hot trend in the APAC countries. I recently came across a news story in Korean media which paints a much sober picture. This makes me wonder if all the buzz we hear from vendors and consultants about cloud traction in APAC region is just a noise or there is some truth to their assertions. I thought I will do a post on the topic and open up our blog platform to hear from users in the APAC region.

The corporate public cloud service “ucloudCS” secured 450 customers just in 3 months after its commercial service started. According to the statistics, over 800 virtual machines were sold. In May, KT gained 130 million won in sales from the cloud business, enjoying a more than 30% monthly growth.

The private cloud business to transform the KT’s in-house information system into a cloud environment is also bearing fruit. Over the last year, KT saved 15 billion won in system investment costs and 10 billion won in additional operating costs by transferring its 1100 in-house servers to a cloud system.

The numbers above are not so great compared to the trend we expect from the buzz around cloud in APAC, in general, and KT, in particular. In fact, some of my confidential sources even assert that the numbers are much lower than what is given in that article. If this is true, the traction gained by KT is very marginal and nowhere closer to the buzz that is going around in the US tech media.

However, I do agree that cloud computing is in early stages in APAC and KT public cloud is less than a year old. From the above numbers, there is definitely a positive movement. I would definitely wait before I make any conclusion about KT’s numbers and APAC adoption. However, I just want to highlight that the numbers doesn’t match the buzz generated in the US tech media by both the vendors and consultants. In fact, I would love to talk to users in South Korea and gauge the traction gained by KT cloud. If you are from South Korea, please offer your thoughts either in the comments below or through this contact us page. We assure you that your information will be kept confidential. We need this feedback from an academic perspective than anything else.

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Director, OpenShift Strategy at Red Hat. Founder of Rishidot Research, a research community focused on services world. His focus is on Platform Services, Infrastructure and the role of Open Source in the services era. Krish has been writing @ CloudAve from its inception and had also been part of GigaOm Pro Analyst Group. The opinions expressed here are his own and are neither representative of his employer, Red Hat, nor CloudAve, nor its sponsors.